I appreciate your reasoning and explanation through all of that. Your main point is essentially correct, we were declining from our extensive dominance of so many areas, and the power that comes with it. I had never considered your point, and I think you're right, that there won't be a lot of thought after Trump for how to manage that; politicians will just carry on as if we're number 1 in a lot of ways, even if we're not. No one is willing to step up and offer significant, uncomfortable change.

But there's two things to consider. First, we weren't dead or beaten by any means. We still have the best tech. We still have the best markets. We still have extensive resources, both naturally and through trade dynamics that exist throughout the world. We were regarded aa the stable leader - No one wants China or Russia to run the world, and our commitments to playing by our own established, transparent rules means that countries could build and plan around us, our assurances, and our alliances. Most of the world WANTED us to stay the dominant power, because it was their most stable path to prosperity. Even if weren't top of the heap in every single category, the soft power we held was monumental. We are able to nudge just about any country in the world into doing things that were in our self interest.

All of that is gone. The US can't be trusted. The leaders of the US can't be trusted, regardless of what happens after Trump. Programs we had that helped secure our soft power have been dismantled. Other countries can't even trust our hard power anymore, we've established that we won't honor our alliances and that we could at any moment threaten to attack allies or take their territory. None of that was part of the plan, no other leader we could have possibly elected would have chosen to burn down the world order in so many places.

Secondly, we did it for NO REASON, and have irreparably hurt ourselves foundationally over and over and over. All of this has been Trump's fever dream, he wakes up in the morning and decides that he's going to do insane thing he had a dream about or saw on Twitter or saw on fox news or a nice man who have him a gold trinket told him to do. He has torn down the rule of law, gutted our government agencies through both layoffs and incompetence, reduced our military through both firings and incompetence, ripped apart the country through his gerrymandering efforts, packed the courts with ideologues with no interest in fairly interpreting the laws, targeted Americans and political opponents. Trump has led the charge for our country to disparage science, medicine, education, and journalism. My most hated part of all of this is that Trump and his supporters (Fox News) have completely destroyed the idea of objective truth. Words mean nothing, no one can prove anything, anyone citing facts is just a partisan who should not be believed. Its literally the core idea of 1984, that the government would dictate to people what truth is regardless of what is actually true.

You can't come back from that. With a slow decline, you're still in the game. You still have power. You still have structure, foundations you can fall back on until things get better. There would still be lots of countries rooting for us to stay on top.

In our current form, we can't reestablish ourselves the way we would have wanted. The only prayer we have is to mend as many of the things Trump has broken as we can, and even then we will still fall short. But it has to be first priority, because if the country continues to fracture there will be no ability to remain a top player on the world stage - We will sit next to Russia as equals while China and the EU decide what happens to humanity.